• 0 Posts
  • 81 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

help-circle
  • They’ve already bombed the vast majority of Gaza and resettled people, and the next step is almost certainly another expansion of the settler state of Israel.

    Most of the millions of people that live in Gaza have been resettled into a very small area. Whether Israel decides to nuke them or force them into neighboring countries as refugees is irrelevant to their end goal of settling the territory. The Palestinians are just “rats” that need to be removed.

    I’m sure they’d prefer to nuke them and just get rid of their problem once and for all; a final solution of sorts. However they do have limited political capital in this conflict, and nuking the remaining civilians does have the potential to negative impact U.S-Isrsel relations. So there’s a real chance they opt for just pushing the “human animals” out of the territories.



  • Yup this is the real world take IME. Code should be self documenting, really the only exception ever is “why” because code explains how, as you said.

    Now there are sometimes less-than-ideal environments. Like at my last job we were doing Scala development, and that language is expressive enough to allow you to truly have self-documenting code. Python cannot match this, and so you need comments at times (in earlier versions of Python type annotations were specially formatted literal comments, now they’re glorified comments because they look like real annotations but actually do nothing).


  • I don’t think the person you’re responding to is a Trump supporter. I think they’re critiquing the vast amounts of political energy people put into supporting and justifying a genocidal state and its leaders.

    Your entire comment exemplifies this perfectly. There’s obviously a lot of time and effort you’ve put into forming your electoral views, and you obviously spend a good deal of time going around, at the very least online, trying to inform people how to make better decisions inside the electoral sphere.

    This is exactly what electoralism tries to drive in people. The expenditure of political capital within acceptable bounds. Before electoralism/liberal democracies, political capital accumulated and was then spent on strikes, riots, or revolutions. Things that are much more effective at driving change per political capital spent.

    There are literally millions of people like you in America that could all immediately stop all your expenditure of political capital and it would make actually no material difference. That’s a beautiful thing about electoralism (for those in power), the thing that matters is the differential, not the total expenditure. This is why “swing states” exist.

    I’ll put it into concrete terms, imagine the amount of electorally active individuals in America was immediately cut in half. The population remains the same, but exactly half of the current voting population stops voting. Assume all ratios remain the same. There’d be fundamentally no difference in material outcomes.

    Now imagine if all current political capital was spent towards strikes, unions, revolution, or really any form of politics outside electoralism. Doubling or halfing this engagement would be massive. Real material outcomes would be different if there were thousands more strikes. What doesn’t matter is if the voting population is 150 million, 90 million, or 10 million. Only the differential matters, and only for determining a fixed binary outcome.


  • Presidents are above the law while they’re in office. This case is unique because it happened before he was in office. The message that will really be sent is “wait until you’re actually president to do would-be illegal shit”.

    Still worth handing him a harsh sentence, just to put the orange fascist fuck behind bars, but there shouldn’t be any misconceptions about some true notion of justice here. Trump is just a moron, and didn’t know how to play the game correctly.


  • Glad someone said this, it bothers me even with human ages. Like there’s this perception that as you get older you simply gain knowledge, wisdom, world experience, etc. Not a lot of people account for biological limits for knowledge/memory, nor degradation from aging.

    If some young intern decided to try to have sex with Biden, I think there’s genuinely a conversation to be had about if that’s statutory rape. I think you’d need a healthcare professional to rule on if Biden has the mental capacity to fully consent. Similar to a drunk person. They’re still obviously a person able to think/engage with the world, but they’re heavily impaired and unable to fully consent as a result. Age impairs cognition too.


  • I like your comment, but there’s an important note that needs to be made, I’m not the one who invented the conflation of organizational and electoral politics. Putting all that under the sphere of “politics; not to be discussed at work” was a convenient tactic by capitalists to delegitimize important political discussions under the guise of the important considerations you bring up.

    Conflation is a powerful rhetorical strategy. Capitalists do it with other things too (legitimizing private property by putting personal property under that umbrella, somehow making you owning your own home the same “kind” of ownership as Elon Musk/Tesla owning a factory on the other side of the planet that he’s never stepped foot into).

    The dual to conflation here is intersectionalism, which is important to consider too. It’s not always relevant (e.g foreign trade policy often won’t intersect with organizational politics), but it sometimes is. “right to work” ideals in electoral politics directly impacts organizational politics, so if we legitimize and normalize the latter, it’d be hard to unilaterally ban the former as well. The line gets muddy, and it’s better to stray too far on the side of allowing too much discussion so organizing can actually take place, than too much restriction.


  • I get some people have immense faith in capitalist rule, that you genuinely believe that the reason it’s normalized to not discuss salaries or politics is for your own good. Some people don’t believe in class antagonisms. This used to be a purely fascist position, but liberals adopted it in the mid 20th century because of how effective it is at driving complacency.

    Politics used to be common in the workplace. Not necessarily electoral politics, but organizational politics, which is far more important and impactful, and also much more regulated by capitalists and the petite bourgeoise. I’ve talked to my boss about electoral politics before, and it didn’t cause issues. If I brought up unions with him I’d be fired within a month (based on how other union organizers were let go).




  • There’s a misconception among western intellectuals that emotion and intellect are juxtaposed, that your indifference towards the genocide that is taking place is somehow a virtue. It’s not. It’s your inability to actually comprehend what is going on. If you lived the life of a Palestinian you wouldn’t just be mad, you’d be fucking helpless, and your inability to internalize that and have it impact your view on the world is a common human failing.

    If the bombs Israel purposefully dropped on civilians killed someone you cared about, you wouldn’t be on here arguing against people who use the word genocide. People you yourself admit aren’t actually saying anything wrong. You’re trying to move people who are literally just stating facts about the world in an emotionally charged way away from intense language. To what end? Do you actually care? Probably not.

    You should develop some empathy. It’s not a weakness.


  • First time using Wikipedia? There are actually a dozen resources at the bottom. Use those.

    Anyway, you didn’t address anything I actually said. You sit back as Israel invades, bombs, and slaughters thousands upon thousands of children for the purposes of wiping out a native people, and you argue about the semantics of genocide. It’s so fucking pathetic, people did the same thing during the Holocaust to try to argue against U.S intervention and it fucking worked, the only reason we intervened was Japan bombing pearl harbor.

    Genocide apologists like yourself should go spend a day actually experiencing the fucking genocide, then maybe you’ll have an ounce of compassion. It just sucks having you out here, potentially changing public sentiment away from helping those being genocided. The difference between an indifferent bystander and a genocide enabler is not as large as you’d probably imagine, being the former yourself.



  • Yeah, there are some leftists that try drawing the line at silly points like “oh I won’t vote for someone who supports genocide” but really what’s the big deal? Genocides happen, I think they’re kind of fun sounding. I’m thinking about moving to Israel and helping the IDF finish their extermination of the barbaric “human animals”/natives that have infested their holy land. Biden has self-identified as a Zionist many times before, and I think that’s a beautiful thing. I bet he’d take up arms with me against the parasites if he was still fully sentient. He’s definitely trying his best as president to help them finish cleaning up the trash.

    Oh, and yeah only Trump is a fascist. None of the above sounds anything like fascism, don’t worry.

    /s



  • The goal of semantics, and words in general, are to convey ideas. It was true in the past that socialism was a very concrete, straightforward thing. If you believed in worker control of the means of production, you were a socialist. Now there are people who say they’re socialist, and they advocate for private tyrannies for the foreseeable future (decades or sometimes even a century+). They want entire generations of humans to be wage slaves, serve the interests of capital, pay their reduced wages to land leeches and banks, and then die without having ever seen a better system.

    Those systems, systems by which entire generations of people are subjugated to the interests of capital under authoritarian rule, are now called socialist or sometimes communist. And I no longer have the word to describe a system where wage slavery is immediately abolished (much like chattel slavery was), and workers take immediate control over the means of production.

    Those societies/institutions were often overthrown and overrun by either conservative Marxists (e.g Lenin) or fascists (e.g Catalonia).


  • People say things for reasons, and those reasons aren’t always to express the true state of things. For example, it’s powerful to capture positive social sentiment around socialism without having to actually relinquish any power to the working class. It effectively destroys workers’ ability to communicate effectively about what we want to see in the world.

    Back in the day, you could simply say “I’m a socialist” and that meant that you advocated for a system where workers owned the means of production, and private property didn’t exist. Now you can say the same thing, and what does it mean? Literally nothing, it’s an incoherent thing to say because it has too many contradictory meanings.

    I still identify as a libertarian socialist, but every other person I talk to doesn’t understand what I mean by this (pro-China? pro-Bernie? interested in dismantling private ownership? want to slightly increase taxes on corporations and implement universal healthcare?). Most people that use the label libertarian socialist align with the original definition of socialism, and I find value in that. However for the purposes of communicating to people who don’t agree with the position, it’s effectively useless.

    Destroying that avenue to communicate was definitely intentional, it subverts actual organizational efforts. The same thing has happened with unions. Essentially the entire 19th century socialist movement has been systematically destroyed through propaganda and language manipulation.


  • The only metric that page uses to define India as socialist is “makes a constitutional reference to socialism”. That can mean socialism is some end goal, or they just have policy inspired by socialism.

    Words have definitions, so just saying “this country is socialist” is not enough evidence to declare that country is socialist, unless your definition of socialism is “a system which people call socialist”.

    By that definition, America is socialist so long as I call it socialist. It becomes tautological and useless.


  • I haven’t read all of these, but I have read a good deal of Marx/Engles, and am working through Das Kapital currently.

    I have written similar comments to this, going over the history of thought. It’s important, and not something to be taken lightly (though there is a fine line between being thorough and gishgalloping, especially in the context of forums like lemmy/reddit/etc.)

    Maybe you’re of the view that communism is such a loaded word that trying to define it in just a few dozen or hundred words is a pointless exercise. That’s fine, but if the word is so loaded and complicated, you probably shouldn’t be attaching it to nation-states to try to succinctly describe part of their economic system. The only people you’d be transmitting information to are the people who have the dozen or so required readings under their belt to truly grasp what you meant by communism. At this point, the word provides no value.

    No economic system can actually be totally described by a single word, ever. However, a single word can be used to describe a part of a system, and it can be used in a reliable way. I pointed to very common definitions of the words, ones you seem to disagree with, and even in the ~thousand or so words you wrote you didn’t provide clear alternative definitions. That signals to me you probably need tens of thousands of words to properly define what you mean by the word “communism”, and at that point the utility of the word is just completely lost.


  • It’s just semantics at the end of the day, so not too important, but I’ll play along because I happen to be someone who will call the U.S capitalist, but doesn’t understand why people call China communist.

    First, I’ll start off with some definitions. If you disagree on one, provide your own and we can use those for the sake of discussion.

    Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and their operation for profit.

    _

    Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership.

    _

    Communism is a socioeconomic order centered around common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange that allocates products to everyone in the society based on need. A communist society would entail the absence of private property, social classes, money and the state (or nation state).

    So essentially the easiest way to determine if your society is capitalist or socialist is the existence of private property. If the society is devoid of private property, then the question remains what kind of socialism is it (is there money? Markets? Social classes? A state?).

    China isn’t even socialist by this definition, but even if it was, it would still be miles away from communist.